


a hold on your soul

by atlantisairlock



Category: Mulan (2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Character Death Fix, F/F, Happy Ending, Red String of Fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26475901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: For as long as she can remember, Mulan has always had her red string.
Relationships: Fa Mulan | Hua Mulan/Xian Lang (Disney)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 297





	a hold on your soul

**Author's Note:**

> for a guest, who requested for red string of fate au. i'm still taking requests for mulan + xian lang. you can also check out what else i'm accepting requests for [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pCrJHPCKLp0lHRi7dFEUBtai8ljTEgVYGpd1hjEnmtE/edit#gid=0)!
> 
> title from 'lost on you' by lewis capaldi.

For as long as she can remember, Mulan has always had her red string. She plays with it frequently as a child, twining what she can reach around her fingers and trying to follow it. It seems to stretch on forever, far into the horizon, somewhere she can’t reach. She’s always wondering where it goes, and when she’s four, she finally asks her parents about it.

“It is a gift from the gods,” her mother tells her. She plucks at what seems like thin air to Mulan and glances over at her father with an indulgent smile. “A promise of undying love. A promise that there is someone on this earth who is made for you, and you for him. Your soulmate. The red string connects you both for all your life, and when the time is right, it will lead you to him. It led me to your father, and it will lead you and your sister in the years to come.”

“Everyone has one?”

“Yes, but you can only see your own.” Her mother looks pleased, wholly delighted - in time to come, Mulan will look back on this moment and remember it as the very last time her mother looked at her like that. “If you can see yours at your age, that means your soulmate is already born. Where does it go?”

Mulan looks at her string, looped around her wrist, rising up and up into the sky - past the roof of their home, curving into the clouds. “Up there,” she points, tracing it with the tip of her finger. Somewhere she can’t yet go to.

Her mother laughs, but there’s a sternness to it. “Don’t be silly. Tell me, Mulan, where does it really go?”

“Up there!” Mulan repeats insistently, feeling indignant. She draws the path of the string for her mother to see, and watches as her mother’s expression shifts, almost fearful and uncomprehending.

At four, it’s the first time she’s ever seen that look. She doesn’t understand it until years from then. In that moment, all she knows is her mother shaking her head fiercely, turning back to Mulan and telling her to get back to work and help her father with the chores. They never speak of it again, but it doesn’t mean she forgets.

Her string doesn’t _always_ lead to the sky, but she learns fairly quickly from giggling gossip amongst the village children that it’s not ever supposed to. Not at all.

Her family never talks about it. Sometimes the other villagers ask her parents about it in passing and her father grows adept at brushing the question off. Mulan looks at the string run further than her eye can see and wonders what is so terribly wrong with her. She is different from all the other girls in the tulou, she knows - boisterous and active and restless, and people whisper about that too. She never stops feeling out of place. A gift from the gods her string may be, but it still feels like a cruel trick of fate that she cannot be like the others in this, too.

In a village where even her parents sometimes treat her like nothing more than a mystery they cannot solve, a puzzle they should fear, Mulan casts her gaze at the string and wonders, often, who is on the other end of it. She tries to imagine a face for her soulmate, but always comes up short. She hopes she will meet him sooner, rather than later, and that everything will make sense once she sets eyes on him. That the string’s promise will come true - someone on this earth made for her, who will understand her, who will take her as she is and love her without demanding more from her than she can give. She holds on to that. Doesn’t let go.

The years pass and her soulmate seems to come no closer.

It doesn’t help, she thinks, that she barely ever leaves the village. Her father forbids her to ride too far beyond the tulou, and her mother shows great disapproval whenever she saddles her horse once more. They say it is for her own safety, but it is plainly obvious to Mulan that they simply fear the day she finds the man on the other end of the string, the man who for some reason unknown can take to the skies and not come down for hours.

She listens and obeys, because despite not being the girl they expected her to be, she is her parents’ daughter above all things, and she wants to be a good one. The days melt pass, routine, and Mulan sends a prayer out into the universe that her soulmate will saddle his own horse and follow his string, chasing it down, past the plains and the valleys, until he finds her at the end of it.

For a long, long time, that is all she wishes.

Then the war arrives.

The red string becomes secondary in her thoughts, pushed to the back of her mind and fading into the background alongside everything that is not combat, swordplay and guard duty. There is little time to wonder about her soulmate when there is war looming on the horizon and she is hiding her truth under the bandages around her chest and the voice she tries to deepen.

Her fellow soldiers talk about it, though. Ling waxes poetic about his soulmate constantly, the only one of their little group who has already found her. The others muse about what they hope their soulmates will be like. Honghui is the one to turn to her, eventually, and ask what kind of woman Hua Jun hopes has his string looped around her wrist.

 _Someone who will forgive me my deceptions,_ Mulan thinks. _Who will understand why I stole my father’s sword and bound my breasts and lie with every word that passes my lips. Who will love me despite it, who will love me as I am._

She mumbles something about a sense of humour instead, to Yao’s roaring laughter. The others follow suit, except for Honghui, who looks at her, steady, neutral. She ignores him and focuses on the food in front of her, tries to think of nothing else.

He still seeks her out eventually, despite her rebuffs, perhaps seeing in her a fellow warrior, a friend. They train together on occasion, and once, just once, they sit alone at breakfast and Honghui tells her about running away from home in his youth, determined to chase down his soulmate - riding for weeks and weeks, almost to the edge of the kingdom, and still not reaching the end. How he stood on a hill, months after he’d left his village, looking out into unfamiliar land and his string still stretching so far into the distance he lost sight of it, and eventually turned back.

“Some days I think I’ll never find her,” he says, and though it is tinged with humour she can still hear the very real regret in it. He traces a line in the air, invisible, somewhere to the south. “Do you ever fear that?”

Mulan doesn’t answer, but Honghui has by now become used to his comrade’s silences. He simply tips his head back and sighs, then glances at her with a small smile. “Where does yours lead?”

She could keep silent on that too, especially since he, too, would probably look at her differently if she told him the whole truth. But her string does not lead to the sky at the moment, and she feels a pang of guilt when she realises Honghui has revealed to her something secret of his own, something he keeps close to his chest. He has been a good friend. He deserves to be given something back. She points along her own string. “That way.”

Honghui follows her gaze, his eyebrows raising slightly. “To the north?”

“What about it?” She feels some irritation, maybe a little panic, at his expression - not like her mother’s, all those years ago, but still not the typical reaction to someone talking about their string, and Mulan has seen enough of that for two lifetimes. Honghui shakes his head and shrugs it off, getting back to his food. “It probably means nothing.”

“Tell me,” Mulan demands. Honghui just huffs and shrugs again, a careless movement. “It looks like it leads in the direction of Bori Khan’s camp, that’s all. But that could mean nothing whatsoever. My string appeared to lead to several villages on my route, when I was chasing it, and when I arrived it simply continued far past their borders.” He looks up at Mulan’s expression and softens, tapping her rice with his chopsticks. “It means nothing, Hua Jun. It is simply an observation. Hurry and eat; we begin training soon, and Commander Tung does not appreciate lateness.”

Mulan gets back to her breakfast, and the conversation peters off, but for the life of her she cannot stop thinking about Honghui’s words.

_The direction of Bori Khan’s camp._

Honghui is right, and she knows it - it probably means nothing. A mere coincidence. But it lingers, at the back of her mind, that little voice that keeps piping up. _What if?_

The fear stays with her, just a bit. One tiny seed of doubt buried deep inside her, resurfacing once in a while when she lays in bed after a long, exhausting day of training and tries to sleep. She prays it never comes to pass.

And of course, eventually, it does.

Just not the way she thought it would.

The first thing she thinks of when she chases down Bori Khan’s troops into the acid baths, when she’s confronted by Xian Lang and sees her talons, her cape, and then the string around her wrist, isn’t _she’s a woman,_ or even _she’s a witch._ Mulan falters at the sight of her fabled string finally short enough to see the end of, glowing red between them, tying them together. This is her promised one, and she thinks, first, before everything - _this is why the skies are hers to command._

“It’s you,” she says, the only thing she can think of in the face of her soulmate. She has thought about this moment for years, dreamt of it, hoped for it, and it is like nothing she ever imagined it would be. And yet the string does not lie, and surely, neither do the gods.

The witch smiles, and it should be a terrifying thing, a vicious thing - and it is, but yet it stirs something inside her, something Mulan swallows down before it can betray her. “And who might I be?”

“The string,” Mulan says, tempted to scream it. She doesn’t understand how the woman before her can be so composed, so unruffled, when Mulan is fighting the urge to drop her sword and go to her side. “You’re my - you have my string around your wrist.”

Xian Lang looks at her with pitying condescension, and it makes rage rise hot inside Mulan’s chest, mingling with bewilderment. “Poor thing. You appear to have lost your mind amidst this war.”

“I haven’t _lost my mind!”_ Mulan shouts. But for the self-control Commander Tung has honed in her she almost points her sword to Xian Lang’s throat again. “My red string ends around your wrist. The string of fate that the gods gifted to us, to help us find our soulmates. And you are mine.”

Her voice shakes even as she says it, even as she cannot take her eyes off the unmistakable red loop around Xian Lang’s wrist. Xian Lang’s gaze follows hers, and Mulan feels her heart sinking and sinking as she imagines what the witch sees - emptiness, nothing but her own skin.

Years and years of hoping, of waiting, of holding steadfast faith that she would find the other half to her soul, and her soulmate cannot even see them both for what they are. A bitter, broken promise.

“You spout nonsense,” Xian Lang murmurs. Her voice is softer, but she comes no closer to Mulan. “Why should I believe the words of a liar, who hides herself though she pledges truth to the Imperial Army?”

That hits her like one of Honghui’s punches to her side during combat practice, something bruised and sour on her tongue, like poison. Her sword catches the light, the characters carved on it a reminder of the oath she swore but breaks every day. Her heart hurts. She wonders if her string is no gift, after all, but a punishment for her dishonour. A penance for never being good enough a daughter nor a soldier both.

“Do you not find it pathetic?” Xian Lang says, her tone mocking now. “To believe your fate is decided by the gods, and not by yourself? A girl who cannot make her own choices when it comes to her heart. Is that who you are?”

The anger coils inside her, like a snake, poised to sink its fangs into soft flesh, to kill. “You made a choice to serve a murderous coward,” she snarls back. “You kill innocent men to serve the bloodlust of a tyrant. Does that bring you more honour?”

Her words hang in the air, and before her, Mulan sees Xian Lang take a single step back. Her expression is frozen, cold and neutral. “Foolish girl,” Xian Lang whispers, the words falling like pebbles at her feet. The string between them extends as she retreats, further and further, and then she morphs back into her winged form and takes flight. Mulan watches her string follow, soaring into the sky once more. It feels like there is a fist around her heart, squeezing impossibly tight, making it hard to breathe. She inhales shakily and tightens her grip around her sword.

_Is that who you are?_

No, Mulan thinks. She brings a hand to the knot of her hair, letting it loose. She knows who she is. She knows the job she has to do.

She does cry, when it is all over. When she has turned the tide of battle against the Rourans, burying them under cold, unforgiving snow; when she has saved the lives of her fellow soldiers but showed her hand while doing it. She doesn’t regret it - not even when Commander Tung expels her and tells her to never show her face at the garrison again on pain of death. She has chosen truth, and she knows it to be for the best. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a pain like nothing she’s known before. In the garrison, amongst her fellows, learning to be a soldier - it felt right in a way she never did back in the village. She didn’t belong, even there, not really - but she knew it was where she wanted to be. She knew her worth as a warrior, felt at home in her father’s armour and with her sword in hand, and now - now, she has nothing and nowhere to go.

Xian Lang finds her four hours in, making the slow journey back to her village. Mulan looks dully at the string around her wrist, so bright it feels like it’s mocking her. “If you are here to kill me, I will have you know it will not be an easy fight.”

“Foolish girl. Why would I want to kill you?”

Mulan bites back a scathing retort at the word _girl,_ still aching from the way Commander Tung sent her home and told her Hua Mulan would never be welcome in his troops the way Hua Jun was. “What else have you come for? To taunt me about my belief in the gods and the broken promise they have bestowed upon me?”

Xian Lang steps closer and utterly ignores the way Mulan lifts her blade to point it at her throat. “We are not that different, you and I.” Her gaze is piercing and sends a shudder down Mulan’s spine. “I was once like you. I tried to walk a path of honour, and I believed in the gods’ promises, too. Promises of fairness and goodness, and a place in this kingdom. But everywhere I turned, I was shunned and spat on, told there was no land under heaven for a witch. This kingdom turned its back on me. Why are you surprised I turned my back on it?”

Mulan feels a sudden, overwhelming wave of exhaustion sweep over her, and she brings her sword down, her shoulders slumping. Her eyes are still wet with the tears she cried as she walked away from the battlefield. “I am loyal to the Emperor,” she whispers. “I have always been, my entire life. I love my kingdom. And I have loved you too, my entire life, without even knowing you. I have always wanted to belong, and now I never will.”

“There is no reward to be found in loving something that does not love you back,” Xian Lang replies. She moves a step closer and settles her hand, warm, against Mulan’s shoulder, and even now Mulan lets her. “I have no red string around my wrist. I have no gift from the gods. But I can offer you power and partnership. You are a great warrior, and you know what I am. Together, we could do great things.”

Mulan clenches her fist, not taking her eyes off her string. All the years she has spent, waiting and longing, believing the promise inherent in it. It feels like her heart has shattered, with no hope of ever piecing it back together. 

She could go with Xian Lang, she knows. It might even be the same thing - she would be by her soulmate’s side, even if soulmate in question does not understand the bond that ties them together. It is what she has always wanted, in all those moments of loneliness that defined her childhood.

But she gave up her position in the Imperial Army for her truth, for her oath. Can this be her truth? To love someone who does not love her back? The gods have given her a gift. But she knows now that it is still up to her as to how she uses it.

The silence stretches on, and Mulan knows Xian Lang already has her answer. Is she imagining things, or is there a hint of regret in her eyes when she steps back once more? “I suppose you have made your choice, then,” she says. “To be loyal to a kingdom that cannot see your worth beyond your womanhood.”

“And Bori Khan does?” Mulan challenges, if only for the vicious pleasure of seeing Xian Lang’s expression falter for the briefest second. “Do you owe him your loyalty?”

Another silence. Mulan meets Xian Lang’s unblinking gaze without flinching and simply waits until the answer she expected is given. “No,” she says, exhaling sharply. Her gaze is flint. “Do you think I wish to serve him? Do you think I would if I had a choice?”

Mulan lifts her chin. She tears her eyes from her red string and wills her voice not to tremble. “There is always a choice.”

Xian Lang doesn’t change her allegiances - Mulan never expected so much. She does reveal Bori Khan’s plans, which she decides will have to be enough. Even though her heart hurts when Xian Lang takes off back into the sky once more. Even though she watches her go and knows she will likely never see her again.

She has lived her entire life loving the person on the other end of her string, back when she still believed they were a mortal man. But she has also lived her entire life believing she could never be more than a simple girl in a village.

She can survive this, and she will.

Though first she has to survive this war - she has to take her information back to Commander Tung and survive the encounter, too. When she returns to the garrison, she drops to her knees in front of him and begs him to listen.

He doesn’t, not at first. But Honghui does, and so do the other men, and it turns out that is enough.

“We leave now,” Commander Tung declares, when he is convinced. “You will lead us to the palace.”

So she does. They ride hard through the night, and Mulan spends the entire journey praying that they are in time. She has to be, or it will all have been for naught.

They aren’t.

The palace is eerily empty when they arrive, until the Rourans spring their trap and they are surrounded from all sides. They push through, further and forward, and even then she has to leave Honghui and the others in that alley while she seeks the Emperor.

She is alone when she finds the throne room, when she believes she finds him - believes she’s made it before Bori Khan can lay hands on him. But when she looks up from where she’s on her knees, the only person on the throne is Xian Lang.

“So you led your men here,” she says. “An equal at last.”

“I thought you said you owed Bori Khan no loyalty,” Mulan fires back. “Where is the Emperor?”

“I owe him none either,” Xian Lang says. “Do you think he would show me any mercy regardless? Any one of your fellow soldiers would end my life without a thought simply for being a witch, and so would he.”

“I won’t let him.” She’s not sure where the words come from, the courage. “I won’t - help me. Xian Lang, please. Lead me to him, and I swear on my sword that I won’t let you come to harm at the hand of my people. Please.”

Xian Lang laughs. It sounds bitter. “Such big words. A mighty promise indeed. And for what? Because you believe in some farcical idea of a soulmate bestowed upon you by the gods? Because you believe you owe your devotion to someone you do not know?”

“The red string is given by the gods, but my choices are made by me,” Mulan says. “And I know you now. I do.”

“What do you know of me, little girl?”

Mulan clenches her jaw and meets her eyes. “I know you want to belong someplace. I know you want people to see you for who you are, and let you be without demanding you to bend to their whims. You are a woman and a witch, and more than that. A warrior. So am I.” She flexes her wrist and sees the pull of the string, the one thing that has always held true for her, always. She thinks she knows now why this was the promise made to her. Not a punishment, not penance, but simply the one person on this earth who has never wanted to see any part of Mulan but her true self. “You said it yourself. We are not so different, you and I.”

Xian Lang stands still before her, resplendent in the light, and she looks at Mulan like she is seeing her for the first time. “Please,” Mulan continues, keeping her voice low and soft. “Where is the Emperor?”

Xian Lang gives no answer, but with a whip of wind there is suddenly a bird taking flight in the throne room, diving out past the roofs. Mulan scrambles to follow without hesitation. Xian Lang flies ahead, faster than even she can be on her feet, but the string between them stretches and Mulan follows it with ease. She runs faster than she ever has in her life, over roofs and down through narrow footpaths to reach the towering bamboo structure upon which the Emperor is held.

She is so, so close, mere steps away from it - mere steps away from scaling it and giving Bori Khan the fight he is seeking and either saving the Emperor or dying in her attempt to do it. But Bori Khan catches sight of her, and even from that height she sees him nock an arrow. One moment, and Xian Lang is a familiar silhouette in front of him, her back to Mulan; the next, the arrow’s flight is halted in the air, buried not in Mulan’s breast but an eagle’s.

Xian Lang takes shape in her arms, a terrible weight. Mulan looks down in speechless horror as the thin red loops around both their wrists start to fade. All her life she has had her string, glowing bright, constant and unchanging. She has always known there was someone waiting for her on the other end of it. She cannot imagine going through the rest of her life looking down at her hand and seeing nothing at all.

Xian Lang’s gaze is locked on hers, her face pale, blood in her mouth, and Mulan cannot reconcile that with the world as she knows it to be true, either.

“No red string,” she slurs, barely above a whisper. Mulan feels a sob rise up in her throat and does not quash it. “No red string commands me to call you mine. Only my own heart.”

Her string is barely visible now. A thread, if that. It has always been a promise of someone that would accept her as she is, and when it disappears entirely, she will never find that ever again.

Xian Lang gives her a gentle push, the vestiges of her strength fading. “Take your place,” she says. “Go.”

 _My place is here by your side,_ Mulan wants to say. Wants to believe it. Her soulmate is dying and it is not something she will ever come back from.

But they are not so different. They never have been.

Mulan lets Xian Lang rest on the sands, her eyes closing. She turns and runs to reach Bori Khan and the Emperor, because she has a job to do. She will do it or she will die trying. And if, heaven forbid, she does - well, she knows who she will be returning to.

She doesn’t die. And after she sends Bori Khan plunging to the ground and an arrow pierces his heart like it did Xian Lang’s and she frees the Emperor, when they descend the bamboo structure and returns to solid ground, she realises her string is not yet faded.

The gods gave her a gift.

And when she asks, when she begs, the Emperor gives her another.

She is the first thing Xian Lang sees when she awakens once more. Mulan makes sure of that. Her eyes are barely open but she gives Mulan a smile. “I think I understand now what a gift the gods have bestowed upon me.”

Mulan laughs softly. “An incredible capacity for healing?”

Xian Lang reaches out with trembling fingers, and Mulan lets her hand be found. “I mean you.”

Mulan squeezes the hand she holds, feeling hot joy spill over in her chest, the promise of something new and real, something she will have time to learn for herself. “Then I suppose you have made your choice,” she murmurs, called back from days ago.

And Xian Lang turns her head and brings Mulan’s hand to her lips, brushing a kiss to the back. “No,” she says. “It’s not a choice.” Her eyes are open, and she’s smiling when she traces the red string between them with one finger. “It is a promise.”

Tears prick Mulan’s eyes without her permission, and she blinks them away. “You can see it now?”

“Perhaps that is what I needed,” Xian Lang says. “To come so close to losing myself, before I could find you. I am sorry I have kept you waiting for so long.”

She thinks she might be full to bursting, her throat choked with all the words she wishes to say. They have time, now. All those years, all the loneliness. It has come to this. And Mulan would change nothing. “I have loved you my whole life.”

“I know, my warrior,” Xian Lang says. The string around both their wrists glows bright, pressed together. “And this is my promise - I will love you for the rest of mine.”


End file.
